


whoso list to hunt

by elftrash



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, elf hair nonsense, sexy haircutting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-09 14:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20996303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elftrash/pseuds/elftrash
Summary: I knew already that I would do anything Maedhros asked of me. I had found that out in Angband.





	whoso list to hunt

Maedhros didn’t say anything as I cut his hair away. 

When I brought him home from Thangorodrim, it had been a snarled mat of blood and filth that stopped a comb a few inches from his skull, and even the colour seemed to have fled. Washing had brought the red back, once he was well enough to bear it, and several weeks of serious effort had allowed me to tease away most of the knots. It had been a good excuse to be near Maedhros, to touch him, to talk to him, and to make him talk to me, but I had had no desire to cause him further pain, and I was as tender with the comb as I could be.

_ Too_ tender, because my cousin had pulled away, and said,

“Fingon, I think you can do rather better than _that. _”

“I’m trying to be gentle.”

“I’d rather you tugged a little and did a decent job of it! It’s all right now, you know,” he’d added, and glanced at me over his shoulder, grey eyes terribly sad despite his smile. “Harder! I shan’t break.”

I’d saved his hair. I felt rather proud of that. It was something I _could_ take pride in; I couldn’t entirely feel it for the rescue itself. People kept congratulating me – the ones who weren’t still furious I’d gone at all, either because of the lack of planning I’d shown, or because they thought any Fëanorian deserved what they got. For the ones who approved, they saw it as a simple and glorious thing: a life snatched back from certain torment and probable death, a blow to Morgoth’s ugly face, hope despite death and defeat. We couldn’t bring back Finwë, or Argon, or Elenwë - even Fëanor - to say nothing of the many lost on the Ice and fighting Morgoth. Yet we – I – had saved Maedhros!

But to me it was no triumph. I was glad to have saved him – I think I might have died myself, in every way that mattered, to know he was still suffering somewhere, or that he had died friendless and alone and in pain – but it was complicated by the memory of Maedhros’s face as he begged me for death, and my choice to give it to him. I think it was only because I _had_ made that terrible choice that the grace we didn’t deserve was granted to us, but it was hard to come back from that moment, that decision.

I had looked at the thin, tormented body of my cousin and agreed to give him death, knowing that I had no way to save him, and nothing else to give. I had drawn my bow, nocked my arrow, and set up the shot, and I had known that it would strike where I meant it to. I could feel it in the tension of the bow itself, the drawn string, the muscle and bone of my arm and hand. I had known that when I released the arrow, it would find my cousin’s pale throat, a little to the left of the hollow at the base of it, where I had always longed to press my mouth. It would pierce the pumping artery there, if the Valar were kind, and death would be quick, but not instant. I would have to watch and listen to him die. His blood might reach me even from so far above, the splatters on my face the last touch Maedhros would ever give me.

I had known, and Maedhros had known, and in the moment before I shot I looked at him for the last time, a long, terrible look that tried to press him in my memory in every detail precisely as he was, for all time.

I don’t know what my eyes or face told him, but he had looked back at me with the same terrible wordlessness, and then, at last, had smiled.

“It’s all right, you know,” he’d said; and then, “Fingon, _please.” _

And with a prayer, I’d let the arrow go, and known he was dead. 

It would have struck home, had the wind not changed so suddenly. The King of Eagles had come to us instead, but I would always know that I had looked on the person I loved most and meant to kill him, and he would always know whatever my face had shown him. I would always know the heat of his blood as it made my fingers slip on the knife, and I would always know what it felt like to cut through living flesh and bone, to wound someone I loved so terribly in order to save him.

I’d taken his hand, but I’d saved his hair. It was a poor trade, but it was something. Then three months after the rescue, Maedhros handed me a knife and told me to cut that off, too. 

“I _can’t_,” I told him. “How can you ask me that?”

“I’ve asked you worse,” he said. “Don’t look so tragic! It’s only hair. I _can_ hack it off myself, if I must, but you know I’ll make poor work of it.”

“Don’t make me,” I said. I’d do anything he asked of me, my beloved cousin who wouldn’t speak of Thangorodrim, who practiced the sword for eight hours every day, his eyes terrible. I had taken his hand when he asked me; I would have taken his life.

I refused to take his hair.

“Fingon,” Maedhros said. “It’s only hair. It’s hair I can’t manage to keep braided myself any longer, and I can’t depend on you forever.”

“ – You could.”

“I think my uncle the High King might quarrel with me making his son my body-servant,” he said lightly, and handed me his knife. 

We were in his house by the lake, a small wooden building that had been his since before he led his party out to treat with Morgoth, and which he had reclaimed. The Fëanorians had wanted him to join them at the far side of Lake Mithrim as soon as he was well enough to do so, but since he had publicly ceded the crown to my father their demands had become decidedly less pressing.

I was glad for it, but it preyed on my mind, too, looking across the water to the opposite camp. We were one people again, Maedhros had said, but we were still separate. We couldn’t have them with us, after the Ice – but we couldn’t let them just fester over there forever, growing deeper in resentment. I wished we could! I did. Any permanent solution seemed likely to wrest my cousin away, unless he proved the traitor some of them had called him and cleaved to my father and to me. 

I already knew that even if he wanted to, Maedhros would never do it. He wouldn’t betray his dead father; he wouldn’t betray his brothers. He had sworn an Oath. And I knew, too, that Maedhros would justify those stark, irrational facts with the claim that he was doing it to exercise control over them, to whatever degree he could; under his lordship, he might keep all the roiling Feanorians in harness and in some way useful to my father, to the fight of the Noldor against the Dark.

He would say that was why, and believe it, but I took some leave to doubt that his wilder brothers would obey him if he ever gave them commands they didn’t want to follow already. Fëanor had practiced and preached rebellion against the mandate of the Valar themselves, and his sons had learned his lessons too well.

Would Maedhros obey my father if he ever gave him orders Maedhros didn’t want to follow? I was fairly sure that my father would be careful never to do so. Maedhros firmly believed he would follow, and it was better that he never learned otherwise about himself. 

As for myself – I knew already that I would do anything Maedhros asked of me. I had found that out in Angband. 

I took the knife.

Maedhros sat down in one of the wooden chairs by the hearth, something the Feanorians had made while the rest of us were still struggling over the Ice. The light from the fire found an echo in his hair, a long and glorious fall of crimson and amber, wine and apricots, red and gold. 

He bent his head forward, and his hair parted like water to reveal the knob of bone at the base of his pale neck. 

I came to stand behind him. “I hate you, you know,” I said conversationally.

“I know,” he said. 

Both of us meant something else.

“How short do you want it?”

“I don’t want it to stand up,” he said. “Not short enough to be bristly; but not long enough to need braiding or too much brushing to keep it neat. Long enough to stay out of my eyes – or short enough not to reach them.”

I pictured him with a short fringe a finger’s-width deep on his high white forehead, and shuddered. It would be obscene. There were reasons cutting hair was such a taboo amongst us. 

“You had better borrow Aegnor’s pomade, then,” I said. “I think he’s started making it out of deer fat.”

“Remind me to stand downwind!”

“You don’t think it’ll help you keep your own hair obedient?”

“I think,” Maedhros said very seriously, “I would prefer to be dead,” and we laughed together. 

“All right,” I said, and ran my hands through his long hair for the last time. It smelled of woodsmoke the way everything did now, but the scent of lavender soap lay underneath that, like a secret, one you had to put your nose close to his skull to find. It was so soft. It was beautiful, the threads of it curling around my fingers. I caught a long tress and brought it to my lips, and then let it go.

The first cut was painful – for me, not him. He sat straight-backed in his chair and didn’t move at all as the gleaming strands fell around his shoulders. I didn’t mourn them after I had begun. I would, of course, but I had made my choice, and I had a task to do, and it was a task that required me to set a steadying hand to one side of his head at times, or to brush red-gold chaff away from where it clung to the hot curve of his neck: to circle him and stare very closely, so as to be sure it was coming out even. Every cut bared more of his throat and his ears to the air, obscenely naked, and revealed more of the beautiful shape of his head.

It was desecration, but it was also sensual. We were so terribly aware of each other. It was one of the most sensual hours I had spent in his company, and that included the time in the bliss of Valinor when my cousin and I had swam naked together and traded glances under the water at each other, the green river lit by shafts of piercing golden Tree-Light. We had said nothing then, either, but twice I had caught him looking.

“Thank you, Fingon,” Maedhros said when I was done. He lifted a hand – his only one – to feel at the shape of what I had done, the chin-length helmet of brazen hair I had left him. His empty wrist stayed in his lap. “I’m sorry for asking still more of you.”

“No, you’re not,” I said.

“I – regret the necessity,” he said, and that, at least, was true. 

I knew why he had asked it. He was stupid, to think that I would love him less without his hair; so _stupid_, to think he could sever the silent bond between us by such an act. Did he think it would hurt less when he left to join his brothers if I hated him a little for what he had made me do? Did he think there was anything that _could_ make me hate him, after the way all the hot anger that had fuelled me over the Ice had vanished at once, the moment I had heard he was captured?

Maedhros was very good at convincing himself of things he wanted to believe, and I was very good at seeing through them.

I skimmed my hand down the bare skin that ran unimpeded from his earlobe to the collar of his shirt now. Had I ever wanted to kiss anything as much as the stark white skin behind his ear? Had anything ever been as naked, ever, as his throat was?

“Was there more hair lingering there?” he asked, sounding only curious, although as I watched a remarkable surge of red climbed from his collar to his ear-tips. “I’ll probably need a bath to get rid of it. I’m sure some went down my shirt; it’s itching terribly.”

“Perhaps you ought to take it off,” I suggested.

“What?” 

I set my hands on his shoulders and my chin on the top of his head. The heavy gold woven through my hair fell forward, and my own dark braids framed his face. “Perhaps we should go for a swim in the lake.”

“I – _Fingon_,” Maedhros said. I could feel his posture change, as he accepted that his cruel gambit had failed, that he was still fairly caught in my grasp. “It’s – That wouldn’t be –”

“Proper?” I asked, and turned my head so my cheek was pressed to his head instead. “Appropriate?”

“Wise.”

_Hurt me_, my cousin said, but it was me he meant to hurt, for my own good. _Harder. Please, Fingon. _

To wound me terribly in order to save me, the way I had him.

“I believe I am called _valiant_, not wise.”

“They should never have let you go after me,” Maedhros said, abandoning pretence. “You might have died in Angband, or been captured, and I would rather have hung there for a thousand years than –” He said nothing more for a long moment. Then, “You followed me into battle, Fingon. You leapt into the fighting at Alqualondë; you took upon yourself the stains and dishonour that should have been mine alone, mine and all Fëanor’s kin. I never wanted any of that to touch you. I won’t let it.”

“So you’ll go,” I said. I had been listening at doors and in meetings. “Into the East; and leave me untouched forever?”

“I don’t think it will be forever.”

“So you mean to come back?”

“– No.”

“Thank you, cousin!” I said. “Do you think me so fickle?”

“I think you so loyal,” Maedhros said, and now his hand came up, the only one, to cover mine where it grasped his shoulder. “I think you have an allegiance and a duty here that outweighs what you feel for me, as mine in the East must outweigh whatever I feel for you. I think you can still make yourself a normal life, a good life.”

The fire had burned down almost to the coals, the boughs charred black and grey as the flames contracted, the room chilled.

I _did_ hate him. “Why do you _always_ think you can make things other than what they are, by wishing them so? It would be so wonderful if only we were perfect wooden princes, and could be moved around the chessboard as you wished! You could slot me into place and expect me to stay there; you could ask me to set aside my own desires as though they mattered not all, as easily as you do yourself.”

“Do you think it so very easy for me?” Maedhros asked, and his fingers tightened on mine.

Longing rose swiftly in me again, like a dying fire given more wood. “Take off your shirt,” I said, my own gambit. My hands were still on his shoulders, but the hand he hadn't caught hold of had found his throat, and I gently stroked it now. “Come to bed with me.”

I could feel the way his pulse throbbed, but Maedhros still said, “And if I asked you to work instead on setting what you feel aside?”

“Don’t ask me that,” I said. 

I would _have_ to hate him, if he did. But I would still cut my own heart out and give it to him to eat.

Instead, one-handed, fumbling, Maedhros began to tug at his shirt. The clasp at the top was a finely-worked piece of silver and pearl with a tricky hasp: it took him some effort to get it open. All his clothes had been reworked to make things easier, to come together at the front rather than the back, to yield to thumb and forefingers alone.

I didn’t help him, and Maedhros got the other clasps open, one by one, and then he was sitting in the chair that wasn’t a throne with his white chest bare, and I was still stupidly standing behind him unable to take it in properly. I’d won; I’d shown him, perhaps, that there was something after all that he couldn’t make himself believe.

“Come to bed,” I said softly, and came around the chair to help him rise. He stood up in the circle of my arms, taller than me as always, and I could feel his body shivering against mine.

“This isn’t wise at all,” he said, grey eyes very clear, as though he was looking into the future and seeing things that hurt him. "I wish I could have been stronger for you," and then he kissed me, open-mouthed and desperate and less controlled than I had ever imagined him being, and it was all I could do to hold him safely to me and kiss him back. 

We didn’t make it to the bed.

We sank down to the floor instead, in the rushes and strewn herbs and the red silk of his cut hair, and the fire was quite dead by the time we had had enough of each other to catch our breath, pressed together and shaking. I’d meant to be gentle, to love him as tenderly in body as I did in heart; but Maedhros had said, “_Harder, _Fingon; _please,_” and I had obeyed. 

I always would.

**Author's Note:**

> I thought about calling this 'The Road to the Haudh-en-Ndengin' but that seemed too mean?


End file.
